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Vatican announces Pope is officially on Twitter, account was created back in February

In this file photo taken Wednesday, May 2, 2012, Pope Benedict XVI arrives in St. Peter's square at the Vatican for a general audience as his butler Paolo Gabriele, bottom, and his personal secretary Georg Gaenswein sit in the car with him. ()Photo: AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino, File

The popular micro-messaging service designed for sharing short updates of 140 characters or fewer has been embraced by the Pontiff, though the account sat empty for days after it was created.

Not dismayed, within hours of the announcement the account had already racked up well over 100,000 followers.

The account was actually created way back in February, though.

According to the Twitter API which tracks account details, the Pope’s Twitter account, @Pontifex, was created on Thursday, Feb 23, 2012, at 11:38 a.m.

The account now follows 7 other accounts, all of which are the Pope’s accounts in other languages. In total, the Pope appears to eventually be tweeting in 8 languages: English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, Arabic and Polish.

Not surprisingly, geo-tagging on the account is turned off so no tweets published on the account will be trackable according to location.

Details on the eventual content of the account are scarce, though. The announcement form the Vatican news agency was limited to the handle of the account, the link to the story from the website’s front page linking only to the Twitter account itself and not a press release.

Though a spokesman for the Vatican told the BBC that Pope Benedict XVI wanted to “reach out to everyone.” That spokesman said the Pope would be answering questions submitted to the account regularly.

Pope Benedict XVI is the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics and has been making strides in recent years to become more technologically accessible, including setting up a new information portal on the web for Vatican activities.

Are you going to follow the Pope? Is this a good move for the Vatican?